[php] Real escape string and PDO

I'm using PDO after migrating away from the mysql library. What do I use in place of the old real_escape_string function?

I need to escape single quotes so they will go into my database and I think there may be a better way to handle this without add(ing) slashes to all my strings. What should I be using?

PDO offers an alternative designed to replace mysql_escape_string() with the PDO::quote() method.

Here is an excerpt from the PHP website:

<?php
    $conn = new PDO('sqlite:/home/lynn/music.sql3');

    /* Simple string */
    $string = 'Nice';
    print "Unquoted string: $string\n";
    print "Quoted string: " . $conn->quote($string) . "\n";
?>

The above code will output:

Unquoted string: Nice
Quoted string: 'Nice'

Use prepared statements. Those keep the data and syntax apart, which removes the need for escaping MySQL data. See e.g. this tutorial.